It’s 2020, and you should be taking marketing into your own hands.

There are three things you need to nail in terms of marketing your digital product. And it really is only three.

The first thing is a lead generator.

Maybe you’ve listened to me yammer on and on about webinars. They are really good! But they aren’t the only way, and they aren’t the only thing you should be creating. A webinar is better than a PDF, but at least a PDF is better than not having an opt-in, or not even having a way to connect with people over e-mail.

So you need to have a lead generator. The second and third parts are a sales page that follows a very specific format, and a solid e-mail strategy.

Here are the building blocks of a simple, three-step marketing plan.

Marketing can be as simple as:

1. A single lead-generating opt-in, that directs people to…
2. A single great sales page, and…
3. A series of really excellent emails that connect the pieces.

For some reason when people put on their marketing hats they think they have to be those skeezy bro marketer types that convince you that there’s only a limited time offer. The truth is, you don’t need to trick people.  Instead, you need to sell the value of what you have and what you do.

You can be yourself, but you do need to have some sort of marketing strategy.

In 2020, whatever you’ve created, no matter how great, isn’t going to sell itself. That might have been true 20 years ago when there weren’t very many websites out there. If you were writing something then you could have ranked on Google even if it wasn’t very good, because there was no competition.

That was even before paid ads. Maybe you would have bought email addresses to send to, but you couldn’t do that today because there are measures in place that keep our inboxes relatively spam-free.

It just isn’t the case anymore that if you build it, they will come. That’s why you need to have marketing; a simple, elegant three-beat system that connects your valuable offer with the people who need it.